Social Media has definitely become the buzz phrase of the moment. A big, fat part of that social media sphere is blogging. And for those who’ve slept through the last few years, it’s up there with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, SecondLife and a whole lot of other things too contrived to mention. So, if you’re sitting pondering whether Social Media is for you or for the dustbin, let’s take a hot air balloon ride through blog country.

Big Numbers

Well, seeing as how we’re floating above reality for a bit, we should start by looking down on the big numbers that make blogging a buzzword of the moment. There are over 200 million blogs in existence in the world.

Ok, that’s a lie.

Given that another commonly held stat tells us that there’s 120,000 new blogs being created every day, that number is fast becoming a piece of history.

Estimates reckon that there are 1.4 million blog posts created every day and that too is a lot of new content.

But there’s also the people that’ll tell you that a huge proportion of these blogs lie dormant, twiddled with by a curious user and then dropped like a stone. Secondly, there’s also a whole lot of people out there who valiantly start a blog and religiously add to it every day and yet nobody comes visiting. Inevitably, they too throw in the towel when they realise they’re presenting to an empty theatre.

So who’s right?

It’s no surprise that many are cynical about many aspects of internet trends. We all remember how Second Life was going to be the next big thing and we were all running around in our virtual world looking like a virtual Adonis buying virtual sneakers from a virtual Nike store with real money. Everyone from IBM to Accenture wanted to have a presence there to join the 2 million plus users. Now, there’s typically only 50,000 people on there. Is blogging going to turn into another vast virtual landscape to sink your real money into, only to find there’s no-one there?

Well, thankfully not. Not quite anyway…

Simple websites made well

There are a number of key aspects to blogs that give them longevity and strength. At their most basic level, they offer the user a really fast and simple way to get a web presence. A quick visit to WordPress or Blogger and you can have your own basic website up and running in 5 minutes. No need for hosting, domain repointing or FTPing – just a simple interface that allows anyone to get a web presence. They are easy to build, easy to administrate and easy to dress up. WordPress has dozens of different ‘themes’ to give the blog a nice look and, if you choose to host the blog on your own server with the free WordPress MU software, then you can customise it down to the finest detail. And when you consider that some of the FREE themes out there could pass for megabucks websites, the low-cost, high-speed attraction of blogs suddenly becomes fiscally tangible.

Search engines like a good blog

Secondly, the structured way in which blogs are technically designed makes them fine fodder for the search engines. Everything about a blog is generally SEO friendly… they are content-rich, they are structured into hierarchical themes, information is tagged and collated and, at a technical level, the HTML that they’re built from is well-ordered and Google friendly. So, getting a blog (or blogs) out there guarantees you a presence somewhere on the search engines pretty quickly. At Equator, we regularly use blogs as a core part of our SEO strategy, both on and off the client’s site. This approach ensures we can develop quality links to the site and it also extends the client’s site. Ok, so we don’t set out to expect humans to read them every day, it’s more for the benefit of the search engines, but a number of our bloggers are becoming personalities in their own right as the blogs themselves get followed by readers with a genuine interest in what we’re blogging about!

Blogs can genuinely extend your site

For all people who want to rank in Google, everyone knows content is king. And this can sometimes be hard to achieve with a typical commerce site. Realistically, you want to present the customer with the information they need to buy the product in a sales-focused fashion and piledrive them into the buying engine. It often doesn’t give you a lot of space to add the content you need to get ranked. Staple a blog to the side of your site and all of a sudden you have a place to add rich content that can be linked back and forth to the main content of your site. As well as this, the blog can take a conversational and informal tone that would be inappropriate to your main site and help give your brand the personality it needs.

So where can you go wrong?

With all this opportunity and ease with blogging, why is it that there remains so many blogs that are left abandoned and so many corporate and consumer blogs gathering dust in a dark corner of the web? It comes down to their strongest point being their weakest. Their innate ease of setup and ease of use means they can become throwaway. People get a blog, build it and start to dump content on it without thinking what the ultimate purpose of it. If you’re just going to get on there and tell everyone what you had for breakfast, what got on your nerves or how great your company is, it’s not going to get traction. Equally, if your blog has no obvious or consistent topic, it’s never going to rank for anything.

To genuinely make blogging work for you, you need to give it AND yourself a solid objective. What purpose does the blog serve? Who (or what) is your audience? What is the point you are trying to make? If it’s intended for humans, what benefit do you expect to give them?

If you can’t answer these questions don’t bother starting. The only thing worse than not having a blog is having a bad / empty one. Talking about your day does not court controversy and social interaction unless your life does that on its own. Roaming on and off topic makes it hard to read and hard to follow – it doesn’t give a reader any reason to follow you and you wont build up a circle of followers and like-minded thinkers. And if you are not delivering anything tangible, be it information, news, social commentary or even just links to other sites, then you’ve got nothing worth reading and certainly, nothing worth interacting with – the crux of the whole social media thing.

Now, if you’re also pondering Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or anything else in the social media world, you might want to consider those questions all over again. What is often wrong with blogs are often what is wrong with everything in Social Media. Someone tells you that you NEED a facebook page, you NEED a blog and why everyone else is doing it. But does anyone stop to tell you WHY you need it and WHY the world needs you to give it to them! Get Social but PLAN it first!

So, to ensure we keep delivering you what you want (and deliver more readers for us); we’re pleased to bring you our Top 10 PPC mistakes. Don’t say we’re not good to you… this is free advice. Your home is not at risk if you do not keep up to date with this knowledge but your paid search profitability may well be…

We’ve tried to keep these points as simple as possible. However, if any of this hurts your head and you’ve got a PPC campaign, why not give us a call? We’ve got an excellent team of Paid Search experts at your disposal that can help with bringing solid ROI to your PPC. PDQ.

1. Poor set up of account

The biggest area for failure in PPC (or at least in making life difficult and making costs higher) is in the way the whole programme is structured. There’s no absolutely perfect way to structure a campaign but there’s sure as heck a lot of wrong ones. We always recommend that you follow clear and sensible structuring of your account. Break your campaigns and ad groups into relevant themes. Why? Quality Score (QS) is where it is at these days and your campaign structure is a key contributor to making your QS higher and your costs lower.

2. Mixing Content and Search

As much as Google would love you to believe that the Content Network is as easy as the search stuff, it’s not. And treating them the same is only going to cause you to burn cash and lose hair. They don’t work in the same way; the results will always be dramatically different so treat your campaigns completely autonomously. Enough said.

3. Believing that number one is the only place to be

Again, Google would love to tell you that #1 is the place to be in as many areas as possible. It is after all the most disproportionately expensive position to be in and can deliver a lot of empty clicks too. Don’t get me wrong, in some cases, it most definitely will be. For example for your brand terms and perhaps terms where you genuinely “own” the space. But be honest, if you are just as good as the next guy or maybe not quite as good, it can get a little dear. Some markets are ridiculously competitive, and outrageously expensive therefore chose your battleground wisely. Test various positions, find YOUR optimum position. The first position on “cheap hotel” is a different landscape to the first position on “luxury hotel Glasgow”

4. Landing everyone on your homepage

Just as we talked about for SEO last month, don’t be so homepage focused. If someone is searching for a particular product or service, take them directly there – don’t make them search again on your site. Your landing page also forms part of your quality score, so make sure it is the most relevant page for your chosen keywords. Remember, the only thing your homepage is really good for is typically brand. If you’ve got a decent website, then you’ve likely got a page that covers off any other term you’d likely bid on.

5. Only using one type of match

If you’ve never done PPC, or you have people for that, then the match type might not mean a lot to you but it means a lot to our PPC team. The three key types are broad (match to everything containing the word(s), phrase (match to everything containing the word(s) in the order shown) and exact (match only to the exact word or phrase given.) The various matching options exist to allow you to qualify your traffic; use them wisely. And please, never underestimate the value of negative keywords. You don’t want to waste budget receiving clicks for terms completely irrelevant to your offering (and believe me, Google will broad match your ad to some ridiculous offerings).

6. Not testing?

Confident that your PPC account is 100% perfect? We never are – and we’ve been doing PPC campaigns for a very long time. Chances are it’s not (our accounts may come close!) – but generally there is always room for improvement. Even if you think you’ve covered every base and got every keyword imaginable, the market always changes and you can NEVER second guess the user.

7. Broad brush bidding

PPC campaigns can get big really quickly and this means that you can go from having a handful of terms to track, to thousands. Possibly daunted by the idea of managing these, many people seek to ‘simplify’ things by only managing the bid strategy in groups of keywords, applying one price and one destination to a whole swathe of terms. This is an incredibly wasteful approach and means that you could have a whole set of keywords at one price resulting in a multitude of average bid positions despite the keywords being themed and similar in nature. Conversely, many folk set the landing page for all terms in a group to be the same – imagine if your group of terms all relate to “cheap hotels” but for different destinations. It doesn’t make any sense. If you take profit seriously, you’ll need the time to devote this level of attention to your account to ensure you get the return you’re looking for.

8. Not checking the live ads?

It’s very easy to exist in the bubble that the PPC ad interfaces gives you, where ad copy, price, click through, position and so on are all the interface has to give you. But many people forget there’s a real world out there where your ad is actually showing. Not only that, it’s likely to be surrounded by competitor ads and a whole lot of other noise. Not understanding this live environment is akin to using a GPS in your car to get you from A to B without ever looking out the window to see if there’s anything else that might hinder you getting there. Assess the competitor messages; see if you have unwanted affiliate activity. See if your ad is better or worse, or simply not relevant for the page. At the end of the day, you’ll get more out of looking at this space than any other source.

9. Not using Yahoo! and MSN/Bing.

Ok, we will be honest. They are a lot more hassle to deal with, it’s unlikely that they will never be quite as big as Google and they are years behind technically – but there is definitely search volume on these systems and you are more than likely missing out on sales. Over 50% of the campaigns we take on arrive on our doorstep without campaigns on both networks. Bearing in mind the click costs can be up to 85% less than on Google for equivalent terms and you can more accurately guarantee a consumer audience, there’s real reason to have a fully active campaign on these networks – especially as 2010 promises to be the year they merge to create one “super” system.

10. Relying solely on bid management tools

Many agencies sell their PPC at a bargain basement price. A lot of the time nobody stops to ask how they can sell it with wafer-thin margins. Well, apart from the fact that many such agencies DON’T even follow the other nine points here religiously, they rely wholeheartedly on automation. Bid management tools DO have their place and they can lend a hand when managing a PPC campaign but they are simple pieces of rules-driven software with precious little in the way of experience or common sense.

At the end of day, these tools are only as good as the rules you set up, never underestimate the power of a real live human being analysing your account, monitoring and developing your campaign. PPC automation rarely brings campaign expansion, understands trends, can select the right copy for the right ad and so on.

In that time, we have seen many things change. “Back in the day”, there was no such thing as Google Analytics. Google itself had a rather more simplistic view of sites; people still used FRAMEs in their site and, well the world was a lot simpler – even if to the average person SEO didn’t seem that way. Fast forward to 2009 and everything is a lot more complex, Google has smartened up and everyone knows that SEO is one of the most important channels in the online mix.

So you’d think by now that everyone also knows how to make their website search engine friendly – at least at a basic level. Well, we’re not going to name and shame people, but we can certainly say that we witness every one of these 10 mistakes happening with great regularity today – even though most of these are now the stuff of SEO folklore. Now is the time – clear your conscience by ensuring you’re not on this list (or are at least trying to do something about it!)

1 – Duplicate content sites

It’s so easy to do, you own www.mysite.com and www.mysite.co.uk. You think that you should have a presence on both URLs, so you upload your site to both locations. Wrong! If you consider Google is trying to find the site that is most important and it finds two sites the same, which is it going to choose? It can’t because they’re identical…so it doesn’t and penalises both sites. Rather, what you need to do is choose a primary URL and point all other domains to it with a 301 redirect. This tells the search engines that this is the site and that all other URLs are merely referrals. No duplicate penalty and only one URL for your users to remember.

But don’t stop there! Have you got the same content on two pages on your site? Perhaps because it’s relevant to both areas. Same problem. You need to make the content unique on each page or, better still, have one place for it and reference it from the other page with a link. After all, if you say it well and link well, there’s no need to repeat yourself.

2 – Flash websites

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don’t like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can’t read Flash content and therefore can’t index it.

3 -Title tag trashing

Think of it as Google’s guide to what the page is about. If you don’t have a title tag or, typically, just have your brand or site name in it (on every page!) then you’re giving the search engines very little to work with. Make your title tags smart, concise and useful and leave your brand till last – you probably rank for that anyway! Every page should have a unique tag and it shouldn’t be rambling. Think about your users too, this should tell them what they can find on the page too!

4 – Hopeless URLs

Getting back to basics, the simplest reference for your site is its URL. Way back when the web was first conceived, there was no way to search the web like you do now and every URL had to be hand-keyed. That meant people made them simple, easy-to-remember and in plain English. So, if you were searching for a black party dress then you would put it somewhere like this: www.myclothesshop.com/womens/dresses/partydresses/black-sequin-dress.html.

So why do so many sites look like this… www.myclothesshop.com/icat/8475340985734.htm. If you consider the user has little chance of knowing what the URL is for, think what the dumb search engine will make of it. Good URLs make a site attractive, easy to navigate, easy to link to. Don’t let your site boggle the search engines with meaningless nonsense. Every site should be capable of English-speaking URLs!

5 – Search unfriendly navigation

Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can’t do without, you should consider building a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

6 – Going after broad generics

It’s easy to make the mistake of going after big, broad generics. After all, ask a site owner what they do and they’ll likely say “We do clothes” or “We are in the hotel business” or something similar. It used to be the case that this is how the user searched in Google. But times are changing and people are getting smarter about search. Think about what it is to go after ‘clothes’ and you’ll realise just how broad a search that is. How committed is someone to buying if they search for “television” compared to a search for “Panasonic Viera 50” television”? In the first instance, they may not even be looking to buy, maybe just wanting to read the Wikipedia article on the topic.

At Equator, we don’t start with the broad generics and try and hit SEO with a blunt instrument. We start with the long-tail and work our way up. That way we are targeting buyers – not browsers, purchasers – not researchers. If you can’t think beyond the generic, look at what you sell and then get more specific. You will reach a more targeted and more achievable audience that way!

7 – SEO as an afterthought

Starting a site? Building a new and better site? Chances are, you’ll ‘start’ the whole SEO thing once the site is up and running, working on your content, engaging a great agency like us to manage your SEO and so on. STOP! Reeeeewind! If you’re smart and you want to get the most out of your SEO investment, then you need to start SEO as soon as you start the plans on your new site. Optimising your site for search considers its design, its structure, the hierarchy of pages, what each page does, what it is called, what images are called and a whole lot more. What’s the point of building something, taking it to market and then trying to make it search-friendly. We’re already working with clients at the design stages to integrate SEO and the effects are positive. Consider the power of going live with your new site and moving up the rankings to top 3 positions within a few hours! That’s the difference it can make!

8 – Not going all the way

And if you want to avoid another SEO mistake in site launch, then going all the way. We love running SEO campaigns for our clients and have good relationships with all of them but we particularly like clients who go all the way with us – that is, doing everything we advise to make their site work hard in Google. When you hire an agency to do your SEO, they should be working hard with you to get you links and all that other good stuff, but at least 40% of that is site works. If you’re not doing everything you can to make your site more SEO friendly then you’re missing a big trick. Whether it is making the URLs more friendly, naming your images something useful or writing search-friendly copy, you’re limiting the return you get from any search investment (that includes PPC to some degree too!)

9 – Black hat practices

The history of SEO is littered with black hat practices, invisible text, text hidden behind images, clone sites and so on. But they were not always black hat practices – at first they were just ideas. After all, the whole essence of SEO is trying to push the sites up the search engines beyond the positions Google & co. believe they should take. To do this, you have to learn how Google works to achieve this. You always find things that Google has missed. Google eventually finds these things out… sometimes it deems them ok, sometimes not.

If it’s an “ok” then you’re free to keep doing them as Google believes them to be fair practice in honest optimisation. If it’s a “not” then they will tell you on their Webmaster Central and you’d better stop. Be sure to read it regularly. We still regularly encounter sites with hidden text, rented links and spamming. Here at Equator, it’s white-hat SEO all the way and we’ve been getting our clients up the rankings the honest way for years – so we know there’s no need for witchcraft to deliver you sales!

10 – Analytics

Oh, people who will do anything to avoid analytics. Seriously! It’s 2009 and there are still people in charge of their websites who would quicker feign death that use an analytics package. Why? Well, I can imagine that maybe six or seven years ago, when all you really had to go on was server logs that you would have a reasonable excuse to avoid them. After all, they usually involve screeds and screeds of data that and you would need a fair proficiency in Microsoft Access to make any sense of it all. That, or people would use the excuse that “that sort of thing costs too much”.

True enough, before Google Analytics came along, analysis tools were clunky and invariably expensive. But, in true Google style, Analytics blew the competition away and delivered a free and easy-to-use analytics package. Unless you’re a large public company, retailer or services provider, Google Analytics has everything you will need to get real site intelligence. And if you’re not using it then shame on you! I promise you, 20 minutes simply exploring the screens within Google Analytics and you’ll find something new about your site. And if you want to learn more about Analytics, drop us a line! We’re experts at advanced Analytics installs and ecommerce tracking as well as being rather good at training people. So, there’s nothing to be scared of. Kick your SEO up a notch and get your head round your Analytics and learn where your customers are coming from and what your site is giving them!

In the current economic climate, consumers are so much more price sensitive and in becoming so are increasingly looking for a bargain, and why not if they are there to be had? With this change in consumer buying behaviour cashback sites (which have in fact been around for years) have seen an upsurge in popularity, however we are seeing an increasing number of merchants throughout the affiliate community choosing not to work with them.

So why is this? We are all aware of how cashback sites operate, merchants are promoted by the cashback affiliate in the usual way, but where the affiliate would normally keep the commission paid by the merchant for any completed sales, the affiliate gives some or all of the commission to its members. So far so good, merchants see an increase in sales and consumers effectively receive some money in their pockets.

So why are an increasing number of merchants leaving cashback sites or reluctant to join them in the first place?

Whilst many merchants can see the benefits of partnering with cashback sites, as they can drive significant volumes of traffic for them, some are starting to question their benefits. A primary concern amongst some merchants is that cashback sites are taking commission where not appropriate. For example, merchants are worrying that consumers are deciding what to buy and then visiting the cashback site to make the purchase, resulting in the cashback site receiving the credit for the sale, perhaps where it isn’t due. This has left some merchants feeling that they have just paid for a sale that they would have gotten anyway.

Furthermore, merchants are becoming increasingly concerned about the number of new customers generated via cashback sites, as many believe that, whilst these affiliates send a high number of consumers to them, many are repeat purchasers.

So what do we advise our merchants?

It’s our view that cashback affiliates are an important part of the affiliate marketing mix. Whilst merchants may have a legitimate concern regarding whether or not sales were destined for them or the ratio of new to existing customers, you could argue in both cases that cashback sites are actually acting in the interests of merchants by protecting sales that may have gone elsewhere.

Having said that cashback sites aren’t for everyone, particularly premium brands. Whilst they can aid growth, there is a danger that offering cashback on a premium product may in fact cheapen it, particularly for those merchants who have a specific target market in mind, as the use of cashback sites raises awareness of the brand to a wider audience. Whilst we wouldn’t completely deter our merchants of this type away from cashback sites, we would carefully assess the benefits of their use compared to the effects they could potentially have on the brand.

However you look at it, the fact remains that cashback sites can direct a serious amount of traffic to your website and in doing so will increase sales – in today’s climate, we would suggest to our merchants that it would be better to accept that consumers are looking to effectively get money off something that they perhaps intended to purchase anyway, than to miss out by choosing not to work with cashback sites. Either way, it doesn’t look like their popularity will be diminishing any time soon.

2009 is now here and everything’s changed. Bill Gates jumped ship to run his charitable organisation, Windows Vista was launched and promptly crashed and burned whilst Apple steal market share with their beautifully engineered OSX and the machines they run on. Firefox has come from nowhere to steal over 20% of the browser market (Apple have grabbed some from Microsoft with Safari too). The completely free offerings from StarOffice and OpenOffice as well as Google’s cloud-computing option, Documents, is giving MS a real headache – after all Microsoft Office is over £200! And what of being the biggest tech company around? Google has put paid to that.

So what is Microsoft doing about this. Well, Windows 7 is their great white hope in the Operating System world (and it’s looking pretty good) whilst Bing is their long-awaited answer to the question, “How are you going to beat Google?”

But is it a good answer?

Bing is different… that’s what they say. They say it is a decision engine, not a search engine – believing that it helps users make decisions rather than just search endlessly. Microsoft’s research claims that only 1 in 4 searches users make deliver a satisfactory result. Though again, maybe you should question Microsoft’s attention to detail as their director of Search claims in a video it’s 1 in 4 that are bad. And in both cases, what is ‘bad’ is not defined.

Stepping away from the fluff and hype, let’s focus on the four key areas that Bing claim to have focused on…

Relevance

Certainly bing’s result set is different to Google and it does try and be different from Google. You will definitely get a different set of results back from Bing – but not much. From our topical searches – 1 in 3 results directly matched Google – though the presentation was often different. Google often extrapolates your search a bit and tries to second-guess your search term a lot of the time with results being returned with additional terms thrown in and a fair amount of retitling of pages. But in the examples we found, this again just made Google a little more reliable and useful.

Secondly, bing focuses WAY too much on the URL. We searched for “Ramada London” – a term relevant to one of our clients, and found Bing ranking sites that almost don’t exist – listing londonramada.com (no live site) as a top 10 destination. Its map results didn’t get much better with the #1 map listing for this term not even a Ramada hotel. When it did list a Ramada Jarvis hotel, it failed to deeplink to the right part of the website (Google manages this fine).

Then what of Google’s hidden treats, the converter, the calculator, the mapping tool. Sadly fails all round. Enter “convert 2kg to lb” and Google tells you “2 kilograms = 4.40924524 pounds”. Bing doesn’t. Ask what is “4+4”

From our trials – not so good.

Speed

Well, in spite of their rather more “dressed up” homepage – with its ever-changing background image, it still manages to load very promptly. Clearly some good optimisation going on here and certainly nothing to complain about (especially when you compare it to the increasingly bloated iGoogle page). Results return quick enough but not discernably quicker than Google & co. But, again, if you define speed to include getting to the most relevant result for you, then again disappointment does loom somewhat.

Previews

Now this is potentially quite a smart area Bing has to offer. It allows you to preview the webpages listed on the search results case so you can get a better view of the website that piques your interest without having to click it. A really great idea in our opinion and could save some click and time wastage (perhaps this is what they meant by speed?). The small thing is, there’s little way you’d know this facility existed unless you played around for some time with the results. The only loose indication that you can do this comes from a line that appears next to the result when you hover over said result. But to actually see the preview, you then have to hover your pointer over the line.

Cunning! If you know it’s there. And with 85% of people used to Google not doing this, then they’re unlikely to use it. Great feature, hidden.

Multimedia

Google’s universal search experiments over the last year or so has been ramming multimedia down our throats – sometimes with results many consider overkill. But is bing making multimedia relevant. Let’s compare. A Google search for Britain’s Got Talent singer “Susan Boyle” delivers embedded Google News results, YouTube results, Google Image results, a MySpace video…..and then the traditional link results – pretty much pushed off the bottom of your screen.

Bing returns a few news results and then straight into the regular result set. If you want the “multimedia”, then the new sidebar deals with this.

Clicking through here, the results are usable and comprehensive and certainly comparable to Google. However, that’s it. No image base. So again Google triumphs.

Is it all bad news?

Ok, so our first look at Bing doesn’t ring too many bells, but they’re certainly making some inroads in the USA at least – taking over 8% of searches in June. However, it has since dropped back a bit now the hype and the US TV advertising has tailed off a bit.

Where it has shown solid and persistent growth is in Pay Per Click showing a 44% increase in share of PPC clicks since June.

Additionally, the news that Yahoo! is going to hand over its natural search to Bing in exchange for the paid search means that there’s only going to be growth on the cards for Bing.

But possibly the biggest excitement with bing is in what is to come. Already richer in functionality in the USA, Microsoft has big intentions with “value added” search. Testing certain types of searches in the US version of bing delivers price comparison, hotel searches, reviews and a lot more directly into the result set. Microsoft have been on the acquisition trail and are taping these purchases into Bing to allow more end-user detail to be delivered straight into the results. This is where the “decision engine” part really begins to turn on – being able book your holiday from within the search engine, go shopping or review products. This, and more, is set to come.

Let’s just hope that they make the core results work a little harder while they are at it.

Publishers and networks use web tracking to build an understanding of their audiences’ behaviours and interests and then break those users down into groups and sells advertising based on targeting those groups.  For instance, a site visitor clicks on “parenting” links throughout a site or performs searches using parenting terms and is thus identified as a “parent” and could be targeted with ads for a sale on children’s clothing.  In theory there is a better click through rate on these ads as well as a higher conversion rate, giving a better Return On Investment.  For instance, Vauxhall’s Insignia BT campaign increased brand awareness by 10.9%, online ad awareness by 12.6% and the intent to purchase by 7.9%.

Where the shame comes into play is the use of tracking.  Privacy advocates are saying that there is a blurry line between collecting this data and a user’s privacy rights.  The problem is that people in general are not aware that they are being tracked for these purposes.  To propel this problem the media has picked it up and turned behavioural targeting into the marketing playground bully.  But, recently there has been some action from industry bodies in trying to provide guidelines for the use of BT.  These guidelines will help consumers understand behavioural ads by using a bit of transparency, putting choices back into the hands of the consumer (by allowing them to opt out) and hopefully getting BT off the naughty step.

We look at behavioural targeting as finding people who are potentially looking for you.  In that respect you are just presenting relevant and interesting opportunities to them, while capturing an interested audience.  Research shows that consumers are becoming more comfortable with advertisers using browser history to serve ads (as long as the user remains anonymous).  If we place ourselves in the consumer’s shoes, we would want to receive advertising that is as meaningful to us as possible and that is exactly what behavioural targeting seeks to achieve.  Equator finds these audiences for our clients and gets relevant ads in front of the users with the highest propensity to complete the desired action.  It’s a win-win for everyone.  Behavioural targeting may refine itself over time with guidelines and innovation but it is definitely here to stay – it just makes sense – you want to get the right ads in front of the right person at the right time.

It’s certainly not the be-all-end-all of online display advertising but should be part of your strategy.  Are you using behavioural targeting to maximise your campaign’s potential? Speak to us and we’ll help you integrate it into your campaign.

As part of this month’s Twitter special we wanted to give you a few tips on how to get the most out of this new medium. At Equator, many of us have become addicted to using Twitter and have been experimenting with it on a personal level as well as a client marketing level. So we felt it was about time we talked about what we’ve learned, especially as we witness a barrage of companies large and small starting to use the now ubiquitous micro-blogging tool.

Twitter has certainly been hitting the headlines. With Habitat recently causing a storm by linking sale messages erroneously to the Iran elections we can clearly see there are things that brands certainly should not do. But behind the stupid hashtag associations (#stupid) it’s fair to say that Habitat hit problems because they didn’t define what, or more importantly who, Habitat is.

We all know the old adage “people buy from people” and the same is true in social media. We firmly believe that if you want to engage with others in social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, then you need to have a personality. Who wishes to engage with an “it”? A faceless corporate entity? Not me! But what if that corporation had an identity, an identity beyond the logo, strapline and mission statement. Something that I could identify with. Then maybe I could find something in common with it.

Maybe then I would engage with it and perhaps it would enter my consciousness and be there the next time I encounter the brand when in the mood to buy whatever it is the brand sells.

If you want to engage the Twitter community and beyond, you need to decide what your brand is, as a person or as a group…

Is Your Brand an I or a We?

Nobody wants to engage with an ‘it’. So, the first thing you need to decide is your public presence going to be represented as an individual or as a group? It’s an important foundation for everything your brand does in the social space from here on in and also how others can engage with you. Consider carefully if you are going to go out with a single voice as the personality of this individual voice representing your brand will have to be even more tightly defined. If you go out as a ‘We’ then you can potentially get away with a few tones of voice but keep a lid on it. Otherwise your brand will come across as cluttered and confused and will leave less chance of people being able to engage with the brand personality as it would be changing too much.

What is “I” or “we” like?

On that point, you need to define exactly what this personality sounds like and behaves like. In this area there are no right or wrong answers (not yet anyway).  The only thing is to make sure you clearly define it from the off and then stick to it rigidly. This gives the individual something they can look to associate with.

Are you corporate or casual? Chatty or to the point?  Upbeat or serious? Caring or nonchalant? Boastful or modest? It may be something you’ve never thought about before but, some of the biggest global brands do just this. Look to Ryanair – their personality is encompassed in Michael O’Leary – irreverent, edgy and focused on every last penny. Innocent Drinks come across as caring, eco-friendly and familial – and yet there’s no “head” there to associate with. Brands small and large can have strong personas such as these – it just takes some focus and consistency.

Once you have defined this personality, you just need to ‘go to market’ with it and be consistent. For those who are Tweeting for your brand, ensure they deliver the “personality” that you have defined. Now you have a consistent voice to go to market with AND one people can start to relate to.

It’s all about me, me, me.

Everyone knows someone that doesn’t listen. They just talk at you, not really engaging with what you have to say. They just want to get THEIR point across and really don’t care whether you have anything to add as long as they can hear the sound of their own voice.
And I have lost count of the number of brands on Twitter (and Facebook) doing just that. Why on earth would you want your brand to come across with such an arrogant and self-centred personality?

It’s not hard to get it right…

Firstly, follow some people. Even if you’re a big megaglobalhyperbrand, you should take the time to listen to at least SOME of your followers. Of the 230,000 people following Starbucks on Twitter they’re following at least 140,000. Ok, a lot of that twittering will be irrelevant to you but it shows you care and, if you’re smart with how you manage your messages, it’ll allow you to stay on top of trending topics or any potential bad press brewing. Not only that, when others can see you RT (retweet) or reply to others that you are genuinely looking to engage with your customers – this makes them more likely to join in and follow you.

Secondly, don’t sell all the time! If people wanted offers, offers, offers all the time, they’d sign up to your emails or your RSS feed; they expect that from those channels. They want a bit more than just today’s special deal and how many awards you’ve won. They’d like to get to know you, get the inside track on what’s going on. Maybe even, learn more about the people behind the brand. Give them this and you’re making them feel like part of an exclusive club.

Thirdly, if you want to push offers (and it’s fine to do so in moderation), then consider making them exclusive to the channel – and pretty darn good ones. Nothing gets your ‘followship’ up like a kick-ass exclusive deal or secret preview of new products. If people know they’re getting access to deals and insights not available elsewhere then you’re delivering real value they can’t get anywhere else.

Finally, don’t overtweet or bulk tweet. No brand has so much to say that they can be tweeting every couple of minutes. Seriously, what sort of cut-through are you going to get when you go on and on and on. Most people are too busy to check their Tweets that often so if there’s 25 from you, they’re likely to just scroll on by. If you keep doing it, they’ll kick you off. This can happen if you have an allotted time for tweeting. Don’t have an hour set aside on Friday (for example) when you get all your tweeting done. It’s tantamount to spam. 12 messages in 12 minutes (as I’ve just had from one brand) are not going to get read.

You’re set

Now you have what you need to get out there. Don’t be scared. Don’t wait for someone to hijack your brand. Just do it, and do it consistently and with consideration to your community. You’re talking with your customers without leaving your desk – and it didn’t cost you a penny!

Most of the time.

However, it is the case that, of late, Google has got into the habit of heavily experimenting with what appears in the natural search results. You will have noticed this happening:

•Results from Google News

•Local business results (with a big ol’ map)

•Video results from YouTube

•Shopping results

You can’t blame Google for trying this –most of these opportunities make money for them in some form or another. However, the changes don’t stop there and they can occasionally be a bit irrelevant…

Talking about the “Chameleon”

The principle of Chameleon is that it analyses your search query and, should it believe you *may* have got it slightly wrong, will offer you an alternative result set. Discussed on Googler Matt Cutts’ blog, Chameleon teams up with Spellmeleon to tweak the output results based on what Google believes has a propensity to be right.

Of course, from a user perspective, the idea seems reasonable and doesn’t really cause too much heartache to you the user. After all, if the result Chameleon gives you is inaccurate, you just keep on scrolling. However, for site owners and search optimisers it can put a hefty spanner in the works.

Imagine if you had worked hard to get your site well optimised and you had invested time, effort and a bit of cash getting your site up the rankings for the terms relevant to your site. You had a reasonable average position 5 for these key terms. Then all of a sudden, the chameleon comes along and changes the goalposts….

*example from http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/searchology-spellmeleon-chameleon/

In the above example, if you had a position 5 for the term “labor” (yes, it’s an American example!), you’ve gone from being above the fold (in the top of a user’s screen) to being pushed below the Chameleon results (and to add insult to injury, some erroneous video results). In essence, you’re pretty much on the second page of Google.

Now, your SEO work has to redouble its efforts to get you up to position 3 or above. And as you get to the final few positions the work required gets tougher as the positions get higher. What a pain!

However, it’s not all doom and gloom.

Chameleon is still being tested and, whilst it’s likely to stay, it’s being user tested. What Google chooses to chameleon-match to terms will be verified by those who choose to click THOSE links over the original results and, if the suggested alternative isn’t working, we expect them to disappear in time. That’s not to say Google won’t keep experimenting with new ways of presenting results. After all, they might be feeling a bit of pressure from Bing.

But we’ll save that for another time!

One question we get asked quite a lot is “If I rank really highly on natural search, can I turn off my paid search and get all the sales through natural search?” It seems like an obvious conclusion and one, without any background research, is hard to argue with. However, here at Equator we do pride ourselves on trying to quantify the answers based on hard fact. After all, we can’t say we know what makes our customers click if we don’t know our metrics.

So, rather than fob our clients off with empty rhetoric, we took it upon ourselves to do the numbers and work out for ourselves.

Now we know that there’s a large percentage of people that gravitate only to the natural search listings. At the same time, there’s a fair population that like the paid search results as they invariably take you closer to the “finish line”. These numbers vary depending on how Google & co. choose to present the PPC listings. You will have seen it yourself. On popular terms, Google places three ads at the top of the page…

And when it’s less popular, these ads shrink in size or disappear completely, only leaving the ads at the side of the search results. This factor alone changes the performance of your paid vs. natural search listings. 3 ads at the top and your natural search listing, depending on its position will take a proportionately much smaller amount of the traffic.

But what if you rank #1 for your brand and you want to turn your brand PPC off altogether. Surely this’ll all go to your natural search listings.

If only consumers were that obvious.

In fact, knowing the mind of the consumer is only half the battle. Since Google changed the rules surrounding bidding on competitor brands, the water is now even muddier. Stop bidding on your own brand and you simply don’t know who is going to move into the space you previously occupied.

Take this example from the world of hotels. Here’s a search for Travel Inn (Premier Inn’s previous name).

One can see from this example that Premier Inn smartly takes the first position – securing those sales for people looking for budget hotel accommodation. But who is that lurking in position #2. Who is www.travelinnhotel.net? Is it a Premier Inn affiliate? A similarly named business? Premier Inn’s second URL? Sadly, for Premier Inn, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing – Travelodge cunningly bidding in their space with a handy URL and a much more enticing price point.

Imagine if Premier Inn had chosen not to bid on their own brand and left Travelodge to it. This ‘cloaked’ site would be soaking up almost all the paid search clicks. Not only that, with a more enticing price point that Premier Inn’s natural listings, they would be grabbing a share of the persons who normally gravitate to the natural search listings. Worse still, if you were to look further down the page, you’ll find Travelodge ranking highly for the term naturally. They’ve also got a second PPC ad floating around.

Now, without any metrics one can see that turning off brand bidding here is not a good idea, Premier Inn would leave themselves wide open to shed sales to their arch-rivals Travelodge.

But what do the actual results tell us?

With our clients’ permission we did just this on two programmes. Thanks to strong SEO and well-known brands, our clients sat comfortably in high positions for their core brand terms. Their incumbent PPC programmes also delivered them into a top position in the paid search. We’re pleased to say, their PPC was also massively profitable. But would the £100,000 in sales they got from our well-managed PPC campaign turn up the next month in the bottom line of their natural search?

It didn’t.

In both cases, our research showed that only 12% of the sales previously coming through Paid search turned up in the natural search. 88% of the sales the clients got through PPC vanished. Went elsewhere.

So where did it go?

Well, looking again at the example above for Travel Inn, one can see the opportunities for loss. Not only that, the world of search is becoming an ever cleverer landscape. If it is not enough for key competitors to appear on your brand, you’ll find that as soon as you turn off your ads, even more come out the woodwork. Don’t forget, as soon as you stop bidding on your term, it gets cheaper for everyone else. That means, it becomes more cost effective for others to pursue your brand. What was once a prohibitive term suddenly becomes a profitable sales driver. And when this happens, you’ll find new and interesting people moving in on your brand too. These include aggregators (the price comparison type sites) and increasingly those sites involved in search arbitrage – taking your search click and taking you to another page of search results. In every occasion when we suspended brand bidding we found arbitrage listings appear almost immediately.

Don’t forget that there’s also the ever-changing world of the natural search listings. You may think you have a strong position on your brand but little changes in Google’s programming can change that overnight. We have seen occasions when clients disappeared from first position overnight, only to be put back the day after. If the paid search wasn’t there, they’d lose the clicks. Not only that, Google’s moves to create an ever more elaborate results set means that the search results are getting noisier and noisier.

Take a search in Google for ‘shoes’. Before, all you would get is the paid and natural search listings. Now, Google has decided to put YouTube results at the top of the natural search (only useful if you’ve got great video content). Further down there’s Google News results – another distraction. Then a bit further, you’ll find Google Product Search results. More noise. Somewhere in there is your natural search listing. You’d better be bidding on ‘shoes’ in paid search if you want to cut through all this noise!

In summary, the world of search is busier, more fast moving and more complex than it ever has been. Competitors are smarter, Google is getting more elaborate – it’s simply too much of a risk to trust your natural search to deliver. And, from our research, it simply doesn’t. If you want to maximise your sales, maximise your exposure. Better still, make sure it’s the same team looking after your paid search and your natural search. Here at Equator, that’s what you get. Teams that communicate, volley and parry every day to ensure you get the most custom from the search engines.

Thankfully for us at Equator and all you smart people with good websites, that usually means online getting an increasing piece of the pie. However, just “online” isn’t smart enough for us Equator people. We need to get a little more granular and work out whether it should go to PPC, SEO, Affiliates, eMail, Media or something else. Which channel is delivering the most sales? Where can I get more sales from?

Of course, your analytics will tell you all you need to know about how all your channels are working, where your visitors come from, what converts into a sale and so on. But there’s something that your analytics doesn’t often tell you…

Cookie length.

For the uninitiated, cookies, more commonly referred to as Web cookies, tracking cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a browser and then sent back unchanged by the client each time it accesses that server. Cookies are used for authenticating, session tracking and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences or the contents of their electronic shopping carts.

The important part often missed is that every cookie has a length – a period of time they are valid for. This is known as their deletion date and tells your browser when the cookie should be removed. Some cookies only last for the period your browser is open – commonly known as session cookies. Some last 24 hours, some a week, some a month and so on. It is this variation in time period that so many people overlook. As a result of this, many find that each online marketing channel gets measured in a different way. Here’s a typical scenario we recently encountered:

• Sales from natural search (SEO) – the cookie lasted 7 days
• Sales from paid search (PPC) – the cookie lasted 30 days
• Sales from affiliate marketing – the cookie lasted 60 days
• Sales from email – the cookie lasted the length of the session

What’s going on here is a dreadful contriving of the truth as to how the four online marketing channels delivered sales to the site. Visitors coming from the company’s email campaign had to make a sale in one visit. If not, then email couldn’t “claim” the sale yet if a visitor coming from an affiliate marketer’s campaign came to the site, they had 60 days in which to make a sale that the affiliate could claim. Somewhere in the middle, the company’s natural search rankings had a week to nail the sale and PPC had a month.

This is clearly a mess. So how should you fix it?

Firstly, you need to understand how your customers and potential customers like to shop. Do the products or services you market involve a certain amount of intensive consideration before purchase? Are they high price items? Or do you sell small value products that people are likely to buy off the page? This understanding of user behaviour is the first step in defining how you choose to set your cookie period.

A good example of this comes from the travel industry. Industry research shows that en route to booking a holiday, consumers will spend an average of about a month shopping around and pondering their options before making their purchase. In our example above, SEO and email would lose the sale, PPC would just about scrape through and affiliates would comfortably cover most sales. Not really fair, especially if you are considering investing in all channels proportional to their success.

In this example, it clearly makes more sense to set a cookie across all channels to between 30 and 45 days. With a longer but consistent cookie length in play you will get a much more balanced view on channel importance and how to better balance your online marketing budget. At Equator, we believe it is critical to have a balanced and fair set of reporting metrics. We like to say we know what makes your customers click. Considering cookies, the length they run for and what effect they have on your reporting is critical. Ok, so making cookie lengths consistent does not actually bring you more sales from the off. What it does do is give you is greater clarity in how your channels perform, allowing you to better allocate budget and resources to the best performing areas. Then you get more sales!

If you want help getting to grips with your online marketing, assistance in preventing the cookie crumbling or just simply ensuring you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck, give Equator a call. We’ll make sure the credit crunch doesn’t bite your website.